“Hi Alexa, when am I going to die?”
A recently developed artificial intelligence calculator claims to be able to predict a person’s death date with uncannily exact precision.
The algorithm – “life2vec” – uses a person’s income, occupation, place of residence, and medical history to estimate life expectancy with 78% accuracy. It was introduced by Sune Lehmann, professor of network and complex systems at the Technical University of Denmark and lead author of the December 2023 study “Using sequence of life-events to predict human lives”.
Life2vec – which is not yet accessible to the general public – uses in-depth historical analysis to calculate a person’s life outcomes. Six million Danish citizens, ranging in age and sex, were the diverse subject group that Lehmann’s team studied between 2008 and 2020 in order to determine which of the individuals would most likely survive for at least four years after January 1, 2016.
More than three-quarters of the time, life2vec was able to virtually precisely predict who will pass away by 2020 based on the data presented.
The study lists a few characteristics that may lead to an early death: being a man, having a mental health diagnosis, or working in a specialized field. Living a longer life was instead associated with both having a greater income and holding a leadership position.
“We predicted death because it’s something people have worked on for many years (for example, insurance companies),” he told to the New York Post, “so we had a good sense of what was possible.” Lehmann also made sure to clarify that research participants were not provided with their own mortality forecasts. “That would be very irresponsible”, he said.
